Al had some hallway conversations with members of the TAG who
expressed concern
as to how to interact with the HTML WG. Since we think we have a
case study
that reflects successful collaboration, we would like to share it
more widely.
** summary
PFWG and HTML WG achieved constructive collaboration at TPAC. The
two factors that allowed us to do this were:
(a) framing a workable topic for discussion. right-sizing (and
shaping) the bite-sized topic. Find a semi-separable design
tradeoff, not necessarily a single markup feature or requirement.
(b) separating demand issues (user and author factors) from supply
issues (markup-and-processing options).
** details
(a) the topic:
The topic we want to focus on here was "associating table cells with
the content context on which their interpretation depends." Not just
the @headers attribute; that's too small a topic because the
performance against user needs depends on client processing and to
some degree @headers competes with @scope. But not all table markup
of interest to accessibility; that's too broad. The associations
issue is sufficiently decoupled from other issues once the @scope,
@headers, and browser algorithms topics are included.
(b) supply and demand:
Separating what the user needs in operational terms (in the user
experience) from markup options allowed us to make incremental
progress working from the baseline started with the thread at http://
lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2008Sep/thread.html#msg304
On Tuesday in the PFWG meeting, the HTML WG observers confirmed the
PFWG participants' sense that multiple levels of context information
are part of the requirement to cover real tables as they are widely
used. We worked through differences in vocabulary, realizing that
'nested headers' or 'chained headers' were both ways of talking about
this same phenomenon. This was progress.
The PFWG participants were able to confirm the HTML WG observers'
idea that "@headers pointing to TD" and "TH with @headers pointing to
another TH" were both markup patterns that, married with the right
sort of browser and authoring processing, could meet this
requirement. This was progress.
Having removed some of the spurious sources of apparent difference,
we were able to report into the HTML WG meeting on Thursday a status
of the issue that had some basic agreements about requirements and a
plan for next-steps action. The HTML WG agreed.
Al Gilman, co-chair, PFWG
Janina Sajka, co-chair, PFWG
Coordination note: Chris Wilson and Mike Smith, co-chairs of HTML WG
have seen this and
agree it is accurate.
</draft>